For President Donald Trump, life is a constant positive feedback loop, punctuated by acute instances of narcissistic injury. He famously surrounds himself with yes-men, loyal insiders, confidants, and family members. He bristles at advisers who don’t tell him what he wants to hear, like National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, whom Trump has reportedly considered exiling to Afghanistan. Long after his election victory, he has regaled lawmakers, the C.I.A., journalists, and foreign heads of state about his unlikely electoral upset, and continuously points to the size of his crowds, which he often exaggerates. (A framed, panoramic photo of his inauguration crowd hangs in the press hall of the West Wing.) Nearly every morning, he watches the relentlessly pro-Trump Fox & Friends, retweeting clips and articles from the show and responding to segments with his own commentary online. Twice a day, Vice News reports, he receives a folder “filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.” White House staff call it “the Propaganda Document.”

The feedback loop came full circle on Saturday when Trump, ensconced in his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club for a 17-day “working vacation,” unwittingly amplified some “fake news” of his own by retweeting and thanking someone who appeared to be a staunch supporter on Twitter. “Trump working hard for the American people.....thanks,” the tweet from @Protrump45 read. The account appeared to belong to a woman named Nicole, or Nicole Mincey, or BlackGirlPatriot. She claimed to be a “black pro-Trump conservative” with a Trump merchandise retail empire. Trump acknowledged her tweet by quoting it to his 35 million followers, adding, “Thank you Nicole!”

By the end of the weekend, however, Nicole’s account had been suspended, indicating, according to Twitter’s terms of service, that it had been deemed “spammy” or perhaps “just plain fake.” Twitter users had become suspicious that she was actually a bot and not a real person. Some identified her profile picture as a stock image of a woman from a Web site called Placeit, a stock photo and logo mockup company.

Soon, Twitter users figured out that the other accounts Nicole was interacting with—the accounts that would retweet her and reply to her—also used pictures from Placeit models. Both BuzzFeed News and The Daily Beast spoke with Placeit C.E.O. Navid Safabakhsh, who pushed for Twitter to suspend the account and compared the use of his company’s models’ images to identity fraud. Both outlets, along with Yahoo Finance, also managed to track down a woman behind the account. According to those investigations, Nicole Mincey isn’t a bot, per se, but she’s also not exactly a real person, either. She’s a character created as a “marketing tool,” the 21-year-old woman in New Jersey behind the account told BuzzFeed News, using some parts of her real identity and a variation of her real name. A group of people behind the ProTrump45 account comprise the business; they bought fake Twitter followers and some Twitter ads for the Twitter account to promote their ProTrump45 merchandise Web site. “It grew pretty fast and then [a group member] bought some Twitter followers and it grew even faster,” she said.

There are small discrepancies between the BuzzFeed, Daily Beast, and Yahoo stories—various people behind the account seem to disagree as to who was scamming who. But one thing is clear: “Nicole” is the product of Internet hucksters, one of many fake pro-Trump accounts and misleading Trump Web sites that have sprung up in the last year to profit off gullible fans.

Trump hasn’t acknowledged that he retweeted an account that isn’t a real person, if he even knows that’s what he did. But he’s no stranger to amplifying tweets from accounts without checking their origins first. He once retweeted a user with the handle @WhiteGenocideTM, and in another instance helped disseminate anti-Semitic memes. Trump is, in many ways, the living embodiment of everything Barack Obama warned against in his farewell address regarding the negative effect of social-media echo chambers. “For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or college campuses or places of worship or our social-media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions,” he said in January.

For Trump, confirmation bias isn’t a byproduct, or even a feature, of the media diet he has arranged in the West Wing. It’s a way of life, perfected over a lifetime of masquerading as his own spokesperson and decorating his real-estate properties with fake Time magazines featuring his face on the cover. Retweeting and responding to a fake pro-Trump account on Twitter is just the latest manifestation of a closed feedback loop that Trump, and now a coterie of White House staffers, guard zealously. The user @ProTrump45 is gone, for now, but Trump’s tweet, which contains a blank space where Nicole’s message would be, remains a monument to his monomania.